Play the Piano Drunk Like a Percussion Instrument Until the Fingers Begin to Bleed a Bit by Charles Bukowski Page A

nothing nothing nothing nothing nothing
and now,
on the rug
under the chair
I can see the comic section
folded in half,
I can see the black and white lines
and some faces I don’t care to discern;
but a thin illness overcomes me
at the sight of this portion of paper
and I look away
and try not to think
that much of our living life
is true to the little paper faces
that stare up from our feet
and grin and jump and gesture,
to be wrapped in tomorrow’s garbage
and thrown away.

2 flies
     
     
    The flies are angry bits of
    life;
    why are they so angry?
    it seems they want more,
    it seems almost as if they
    are angry
    that they are flies;
    it is not my fault;
    I sit in the room
    with them
    and they taunt me
    with their agony;
    it is as if they were
    loose chunks of soul
    left out of somewhere;
    I try to read a paper
    but they will not let me
    be;
    one seems to go in half-circles
    high along the wall,
    throwing a miserable sound
    upon my head;
    the other one, the smaller one
    stays near and teases my hand,
    saying nothing,
    rising, dropping
    crawling near;
    what god puts these
    lost things upon me?
    other men suffer dictates of
    empire, tragic love…
    I suffer
    insects…
    I wave at the little one
    which only seems to revive
    his impulse to challenge:
    he circles swifter,
    nearer, even making
    a fly-sound,
    and one above
    catching a sense of the new
    whirling, he too, in excitement,
    speeds his flight,
    drops down suddenly
    in a cuff of noise
    and they join
    in circling my hand,
    strumming the base
    of the lampshade
    until some man-thing
    in me
    will take no more
    unholiness
    and I strike
    with the rolled-up paper—
    missing!—
    striking,
    striking,
    they break in discord,
    some message lost between them,
    and I get the big one
    first, and he kicks on his back
    flicking his legs
    like an angry whore,
    and I come down again
    with my paper club
    and he is a smear
    of fly-ugliness;
    the little one circles high
    now, quiet and swift,
    almost invisible;
    he does not come near
    my hand again;
    he is tamed and
    inaccessible; I leave
    him be, he leaves me
    be;
    the paper, of course,
    is ruined;
    something has happened,
    something has soiled my
    day,
    sometimes it does not
    take a man
    or a woman,
    only something alive;
    I sit and watch
    the small one;
    we are woven together
    in the air
    and the living;
    it is late
    for both of us.
     

through the streets of anywhere
     
     
    of course it is nonsense to try to patch up an
    old poem while drinking a warm beer
    on a Sunday afternoon; it is better to simply
    exist through the end of a cigarette;
    the people are listless and although this is a
    poor term of description
    Gershwin is on the radio
    banging and praying to get out;
    I have read the newspapers,
    carefully noting the suicides,
    I have also carefully noted
    the green of some tree
    like a nature poet on his last cup,
    and
    bang bang
    there they go outside;
    new children, some of them getting ready
    to sit here, and do as I am doing—
    warm beer, dead Gershwin,
    getting fat around the middle,
    disbelieving the starving years,
    Atlanta frozen like God’s head
    holding an apple in the window,
    but we are all finally tricked and
    slapped to death
    like lovers’ vows, bargained
    out of any gain,
    and the radio is finished
    and the phone rings and a female says,
    “I am free tonight;” well, she is not much
    but I am not much either;
    in adolescent fire I once thought I could ride
    a horse through the streets of anywhere,
    but they quickly shot this horse from under,
    “Ya got cigarettes?” she asks. “Yes,” I say,
    “I got cigarettes.” “Matches?” she asks.
    “Enough matches to burn Rome.” “Whiskey?”
    “Enough whiskey for a Mississippi River
    of pain.” “You drunk?” “Not yet.”
    She’ll be over: perfect: a fig
    leaf and a small club, and
    I look at the poem I am trying to work with:
     
 
    I say that
    the backalleys will arrive upon
    the bloodyapes
    as noon arrives upon the Salinas
    fieldhands